CURATORS’ AGENDA: VIENNA 2019 – OPEN CALL FOR ART STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA

Hereby, we would like to invite art students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna to take part in the project Curators’ Agenda: VIENNA 2019 and collaborate with a group of international, emerging curators on the realization of a mutual group exhibition.

Curators’ Agenda (C’A) is an annual 6-week curators-in-residence program taking place in Vienna from 16 September – 31 October 2019, organized for the fifth time by the Vienna based organization BLOCKFREI. It is designed for emerging curators from all around the globe, who seek to discover Vienna’s contemporary art scene in-depth, eager to immerse themselves into diverse narratives and inclinations of the Viennese art world. Based on their applications, ten curators will be selected to participate. The open call for applications is currently ongoing (deadline: 3 June 2019).

C’A fosters communication between curators and notable agents of the Viennese art scene by creating a platform for intercultural exchange, thus promoting dissemination of contemporary art from Austria and encouraging the mobility of all parties involved. The program includes talks, visits to studios of selected Viennese artists, study trips, meetings with curators and cultural educators from leading art institutions and self-organized art spaces as well as with freelance operators and entrepreneurs in the field of contemporary art, who will reflect on their work and their role as mediators between artists and audiences in different contexts.

The final task of the participants is to curate a group exhibition in collaboration with art students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. During the last two weeks of October, curators will focus on familiarizing themselves with the art students and their work more extensively as well as on organising the exhibition.

This collaboration aims to enrich both the curators and the art students with new experiences by presenting them with the opportunity to learn from each other and create a closer artist-curator relationship, which will make a positive impact on their professional development.

In 2018 we have introduced a thematic framework for the participating curators. The idea was to provide them with a theme around which they would build their exhibition concept. This specific approach gave favourable results and it was decided to continue in a similar direction for this year’s edition of the Curators’ Agenda program.

Thematic framework:

“Intimacy in the era of global connections”

In 2019 the Curators’ Agenda program focuses on the topic of global, digital and other (dis)connections and their implications concerning intimacy.

The political and technological paradigm shift which happened 30 years ago functions as a historical starting point for new ways of thinking, new perspectives and new forms of communicating, travelling, negotiating and trading processes. Interestingly, the fall of the Berlin Wall that signified the beginning of the end of the Cold War, was accompanied by the introduction of new digital technologies and network communication platforms such as the World Wide Web*. The soft tool that enables the world to overcome spatial and time boundaries, to connect, to standardize, to democratize has become a communication, organization and marketing tool.

Since then the world has been thrusting into the innovation and progress, while, at the same time, creating a portal to the earthly pandemonium. Oversaturated with the multi-media imagery, public representations and easily accessible machinery of communication, we found ourselves in the society that is challenging our spaces of intimacy.

Besides the relationships among lovers or friends, the forms of intimacy also consider institutional frameworks, city or trade spaces. Different forms of dialogues – from social media, publicity platforms to physical spaces – prompt us to question and comment on the notion of intimacy and its existence in today’s society. The guiding research question of this year’s C’A program is whether and how do we reflect on the question of intimacy in times of global connectivity? How is this issue related to the most recent technological developments? And in what way is it influenced by the mentioned socio-political and economic phenomena initiated as of 1989?

* World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Application:If you are interested in taking part in the exhibition, please send us the completed registration form, along with your portfolio and/or a webpage link, to eva.kovac@blockfrei.org by 1 July 2019.Registration form available for download.

More information about the project’s previous collaborative exhibitions in the framework of the Curators’ Agenda program: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

We are looking forward to include you in our project!

Yours Curators’ Agenda Team

About us

BLOCKFREI is an independent cultural organization based in Vienna. It was established in 2013 as a platform for innovative cultural praxis, with the goal to support the cooperation between cultural groups from Austria and South-Eastern Europe.
BLOCKFREI embodies the concept of mobility of artists and cultural professionals, strongly believing that multicultural projects are of the highest importance and inevitability part of the global cultural and geopolitical sphere.

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